I recently finished reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. This blog post contains
some brief notes on the book. I'll have more to say at a later time.
Primary concepts
- Neither the traditional management approach nor the "just do it" without
a plan schools of thought are effective ways of maximizing the chances for
success in creating a new venture
- Small batch sizes reduce waste by minimizing effort spent creating
unwanted features. Small batches are also crucial to obtaining
constant feedback by customers
- Learning should be the initial measure of progress for highly
uncertain ventures such as new start up companies
- Minimum Viable Products (MVPs) drive the Build-Measure-Learn feedback
loop through constant iterations based partially on customer feedback
and driven by the founder's vision
Other thoughts I picked up along the way are below.
Validated Learning
Validated learning is "the process of demonstrating empirically that a
team has discovered valuable truths about a startup's present and
future business prospects." Part of the motivation behind measuring progress
with validated learning is to get away from the idea that following a
predefined plan will work. Predefined plans do not work because they
do not take embed customers' feedback as a critical driver of the development
process for a new product or service.
The Eric Ries' proposed model is based on explicitly declaring hypotheses
that underlie a potential business model and then determining what
measurements prove or disprove each hypothesis. Eric discusses how this
process called validated learning should work to avoid subjective arguments
that are superficially supported by vanity metrics.
Cross-functional teams and MVPs
Cross-functional teams are necessary (as opposed to organization by
traditional functional departments) for MVPs because feedback cycle times'
speed is dependent upon the team working together in multiple roles.
Communication overhead and bureaucracy are minimized in cross-functional
teams that work well together. Some people are not suited for this type of
work, for example someone that just wants to work on a single aspect of
work (such as programming) 100% of the time.
There's more to this but these are just some of my initial thoughts as I
dive deeper into the Lean Startup and Customer Development philosophies.
Startup Definition
Eric defines a startup as "a human institution designed to create a new
product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty." I like this
definition although "extreme" sounds vague to me, but at the current time
I'm not sure exactly how I would improve upon the definition.
SXSW 2012 Video
In this video of Eric Ries at SXSW he discusses that Lean Startup is a process
for helping execute a founders' vision - it does not tell you what to build
but instead helps you get feedback so your vision creates a product that
provides value to customers.
Lean Startup's Relationship to Customer Development
The Lean Startup and Customer Development (as taught by Steve Blank)
are intertwined. Steve Blank's condition for investing in IMVU when it
was founded by Eric Ries and Will Harvey was that both founders had to
audit Steve's Customer Development course. Eric Ries explicitly mentioned
using the Customer Development methodology while running IMVU. Steve
Blank writes in The Startup Owner's Manual
that Lean Startup is Customer Development combined with the Agile
software development methodology.
Lean Startup as a combination of Customer Development plus Agile methodology
makes sense because Customer Develoment is intended as a general approach
to searching for a business model. Lean Startup also espouses certain
practices that make the most sense in the context of the software development
world including continuous deployment and delivery.
Steve Blank actually writes about the relationship in
What's a Startup? First Principles. Customer Development is how a founder
iterates and tests each element of their business model. Agile development
is how startups iterate the product as they learn from their customers and
combine that learning with the founders' vision. Lean Startup is the
intersection of Customer Development and Agile development.
